Ben Wallace: Yes, I absolutely agree that transparency is one of the steps along the path of tackling both corruption and money laundering. That is why, at the anti-corruption summit in May, the Prime Minister basically reaffirmed that commitment. Even before that, we had worked with the overseas territories and Crown dependencies to ensure that, hopefully by the end of this year or into next year, there will be transparency, publicly available registers of beneficial ownership and automatic information exchange between our tax authorities and those of our dependencies. In that way, we will be able to have access to information about people hiding tax from us, and our law enforcement agencies will then be able to set about tackling the matter.
This Bill is part of that process. A key element of that approach will be ensuring that we work with the private sector to make the UK a more hostile place for those seeking to move, hide or use the proceeds of crime.